Stephan: While the U.S. whose government is a vassal to old energy is building new nuclear plants, and trying to push through the horrendous shale oil pipeline, a project fraught with dangers, countries like Germany are moving into the post-nuclear, post-petroleum world as fast as they can. Here are the latest results. Germans pay more now, although not an unreasonable amount but this will drop with scale up, and they will not pay the undeclared costs of endless nuclear storage, old energy pollution costs, or the health costs associated with old energy.
German solar power plants produced a world record 22 gigawatts of electricity – equal to 20 nuclear power stations at full capacity – through the midday hours of Friday and Saturday, the head of a renewable energy think tank has said.
Germany’s government decided to abandon nuclear power after the Fukushima nuclear disaster last year, closing eight plants immediately and shutting down the remaining nine by 2022. They will be replaced by renewable energy sources such as wind, solar and bio-mass.
Norbert Allnoch, director of the Institute of the Renewable Energy Industry in Muenster, said the 22 gigawatts of solar power fed into the national grid on Saturday met nearly 50% of the nation’s midday electricity needs.
‘Never before anywhere has a country produced as much photovoltaic electricity,’ Allnoch told Reuters. ‘Germany came close to the 20 gigawatt mark a few times in recent weeks. But this was the first time we made it over.’
The record-breaking amount of solar power shows one of the world’s leading industrial nations was able to meet a third of its electricity needs on a work day, Friday, and nearly half on Saturday when factories and offices were closed.
Government-mandated support for renewables has helped Germany became a world […]
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ALICIA CHANG, - The Huffington Post
Stephan: The Fukushima disaster poured and continues to pour thousands of gallons of radioactive water into the sea. How could the result of this pollution of tuna be otherwise? And this is just a random mid-point in this ongoing story. There are other unimagined horrors yet to come.
Thanks to Sam Crespi.
LOS ANGELES — Across the vast Pacific, the mighty bluefin tuna carried radioactive contamination that leaked from Japan’s crippled nuclear plant to the shores of the United States 6,000 miles away – the first time a huge migrating fish has been shown to carry radioactivity such a distance.
‘We were frankly kind of startled,’ said Nicholas Fisher, one of the researchers reporting the findings online Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The levels of radioactive cesium were 10 times higher than the amount measured in tuna off the California coast in previous years. But even so, that’s still far below safe-to-eat limits set by the U.S. and Japanese governments.
Previously, smaller fish and plankton were found with elevated levels of radiation in Japanese waters after a magnitude-9 earthquake in March 2011 triggered a tsunami that badly damaged the Fukushima Dai-ichi reactors.
But scientists did not expect the nuclear fallout to linger in huge fish that sail the world because such fish can metabolize and shed radioactive substances.
One of the largest and speediest fish, Pacific bluefin tuna can grow to 10 feet and weigh more than 1,000 pounds. They spawn off the Japan coast and swim east at breakneck speed to […]
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, - Phys.org/Yale University
Stephan: Increasingly it is becoming clearer that our social problems arise from cultural values issues which simply trump scientific information.
More information: The polarizing impact of science literacy and numeracy on perceived climate change risks, Nature Climate Change, DOI: 10.1038/NCLIMATE1547
Are members of the public divided about climate change because they don’t understand the science behind it? If Americans knew more basic science and were more proficient in technical reasoning, would public consensus match scientific consensus?
A study published today online in the journal Nature Climate Change suggests that the answer to both questions is no. Indeed, as members of the public become more science literate and numerate, the study found, individuals belonging to opposing cultural groups become even more divided on the risks that climate change poses.
Funded by the National Science Foundation, the study was conducted by researchers associated with the Cultural Cognition Project at Yale Law School and involved a nationally representative sample of 1500 U.S. adults.
‘The aim of the study was to test two hypotheses,’ said Dan Kahan, Elizabeth K. Dollard Professor of Law and Professor of Psychology at Yale Law School and a member of the study team. ‘The first attributes political controversy over climate change to the public’s limited ability to comprehend science, and the second, to opposing sets of cultural values. The findings supported the second hypothesis and not the first,’ he said.
‘Cultural cognition’ is the term used to describe the process by which individuals’ […]
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Stephan: Here is the first report of what I predict is going to be a massive transformational bio-technology.
Science fiction writers, you have a new inspiration. Researchers have successfully stored data in the DNA of living cells.
After three years and 750 different trials, scientists finally found a method for repeatedly encoding, storing, and erasing the digital information within the DNA, as part of a partnership between Stanford University’s schools of engineering and medicine.
Think of their creation as a bioengineering bit; Graduate student Pakpoom Subsoontorn explains, ‘If the DNA section points in one direction, it’s a zero. If it points the other way, it’s a one.
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DENIS CAMPBELL, - The Guardian (U.K.)/Raw Story
Stephan: This awful trade is inevitable. Desperate people will pay anything. Evil people will provide anything. The only solution is for the advanced nations to do the research to develop the technology allowing organs to be grown. Healthy organs, no rejection, and no impoverished third world people missing kidneys, or part of their liver, or a lung.
The illegal trade in kidneys has risen to such a level that an estimated 10,000 black market operations involving purchased human organs now take place annually, or more than one an hour, World Health Organisation experts have revealed.
Evidence collected by a worldwide network of doctors shows that traffickers are defying laws intended to curtail their activities and are cashing in on rising international demand for replacement kidneys driven by the increase in diabetes and other diseases.
Patients, many of whom will go to China, India or Pakistan for surgery, can pay up to $200,000 (nearly £128,000) for a kidney to gangs who harvest organs from vulnerable, desperate people, sometimes for as little as $5,000.
The vast sums to be made by both traffickers and surgeons have been underlined by the arrest by Israeli police last week of 10 people, including a doctor, suspected of belonging to an international organ trafficking ring and of committing extortion, tax fraud and grievous bodily harm. Other illicit organ trafficking rings have been uncovered in India and Pakistan.
The Guardian contacted an organ broker in China who advertised his services under the slogan, ‘Donate a kidney, buy the new iPad!
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